Written by: Nicolas Pandolfi McLaughlin
(5 Minute Read)
We all want more followers, but are people that sell more followers ripping us off? I have a personal experience that clearly proves, it might just be true.
There was a point I gained more and more followers, but it didn’t seem to do too much when it came to my sales. However, there was a point where I made one simple change; incorporating vulnerability into my posts. Though, it didn’t get me that many follows, it got me something much more valuable; extremely high engagement. My following went up a couple thousand in the past few months and I’ve gotten a lot more likes and comments on average but most people don’t realize that when you spend money on someone to get you more followers, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get more buyers from those followers. What I did by focusing on giving intention, incorporating authenticity and vulnerability got me higher quality friends and in return, higher quality prospects.
When you do something for the genuine authenticity to make friends, you’ll make better sales, but if you do something to make more money and make it about taking, it will take more from you and out of you to piece things together. This was my new-found super power. The average engagement percent for Instagram profiles with 2000 to 6000 followers was 6%. It may not sound impressive but you have to take into account how Instagram likes to change up the algorithms so that only a few people will see you at a time and on top of that, it takes into effect what you’re posting and your relationship with your audience. Though I only had a few thousand followers, my engagement was exactly twice the average at 12%. 12%!!! Want to know what that feels like? I can post anything I want right now and I will have definite sales prospects every time. Why? Because I don’t see them as sales prospects and I especially don’t treat them that way.
If you look back into history of sales, there’s always one idea that ends up working really well because it’s based off of authenticity, helping others, and building quality relationships. But at some point word gets out how well it works and eventually the word has spread. There’s only so much it can work if everybody is doing the same thing so at a point it stops working and people get desperate. Where does that lead you ask? Mass manufacturing and manipulation of what used to be something you couldn’t manufacture or manipulate without heart. At that point people start spending a lot of money and it becomes fake to the connections who are now just seen as “prospects” or “people that can pay my bills for the month”. Suddenly people become desperate and are no longer confident in their sales techniques, making the building of quality relationships a very difficult and sour experience.
The point is never for more, but higher quality of less and then getting more of that, or as I like to call it building a “quantity of quality”. This is how the order should go and should never be changed; establish quality and then establish a quantity of quality. Where people go wrong is they always think to establish quantity and then build a very unstable quantity of quantity. The problem with that is it takes way too much out of you and is a bad business and personal move for literally nobodies benefit. It ends up taking up more time, money, frustration, and the only thing that makes you feel good is your ego that you are working “harder” and “hustling” to make ends meat. Check off the, “I’m an entrepreneur because I spend 12 hours a day working hard“ box.
Well what if I told you that you didn’t even have to hustle if you just thought about quality? Who would you rather invest in to save your life? 100 people who don’t care about you or 10 people who are die hard friends no matter what? Exactly! So why is everybody aiming for the opposite and paying social media agencies that have no clue about this?! Because for some reason, this situation finds itself in the “oh but this is different” scenario, but it really isn’t. Just for the record, anytime someone says, “well that’s different”, 99% of the time it’s really not, but it challenges their mind and doesn’t equate because it’s going against how they calculate solving their personal dilemmas in their mind for that issue. However we define a survival tactic is attached with plenty of emotions ready to fire at anyone anytime if it’s pushed in the wrong direction. We train ourselves to believe what we believe and the problem about sales where, most the time, the only proof we have is what kind of worked in the past or is what everyone else is doing, without knowing the actual specifics and data.
In the advertising industry this is called manipulation and believe it or not it works very well, but for them, it is a constant struggle to keep growing without spending. But it raises the question, why aim for 1 million people to spend one dollar when you can get one person to spend $1 million? This is how the wealthy think, in fact this is what got me to stop driving for Uber. I remember driving every night thinking, “all I need is this much money”, until it finally hit me while I was heading home after my last ride, “ but can I ever become a millionaire off of Uber?”. That was the very last time I ever invested my valuable time in something I knew I had no potential to earn $1 million.
Trust me, there is an entirely different definition of what hustling really is when you aim higher quality over higher quantity. It’s not adding more things to do, but really less and then making those few moves a lot bigger and stronger. What I do in my company when meeting with a client sources from exactly that. I will suggest not to waste any money trying to buy followers, but to get as many high quality followers as possible. The point is to attract followers that will buy from you almost every time you have a new product or service and if you do the math. One hundred die hard followers spending a thousand dollars a year. It may not seem impressive, but it’s way more cost effective to hit the battle hard from the beginning for just a few months than to continuously struggle to keep finding ways to get more followers. This is a huge price vs cost scenario as explained in the previous blog, “2019 Reveals Authenticity Dominates FB Ads“. I inform my clients we will go hard on the battle prep how most social media marketing agencies don’t know how, in return, giving you the freedom to need very little social media spending. So if you’re going to buy SMM, branding, or just about anything, ask yourself what value you’ll be getting with time because as we all know, time is money.